Meet the Indigenous leader using psychedelic medicine to heal the traumas of colonization

This article Meet the Indigenous leader using psychedelic medicine to heal the traumas of colonization was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When you’ve endured a living hell, then a visit to heaven on earth can provide a healing counterweight. This premise underlies Rueben George’s psychedelic healing work with Indigenous peoples harmed by colonial dispossession and violence. 

Rueben is a well-known Indigenous leader in Canada, having led opposition to a major fossil fuel pipeline that captured national attention and became a flashpoint in multiple election cycles. Despite fierce resistance, the Trans Mountain pipeline was recently completed and now pumps oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific Coast over lands and waters long governed by Rueben’s Tsleil-Waututh Nation. While the Canadian government and oil industry got their way, the resistance that Rueben led drew a line in the sand. According to Jon McKenzie, CEO of Canadian oil company Cenovus Energy, “It is increasingly difficult to build pipelines in this country, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the last pipeline.”

To bolster his land defense efforts, Rueben runs weekly Sweat Lodge ceremonies on Tsleil-Waututh territory, in what is now Vancouver (while not advertised, they are open to all). As a Sundance Chief, he also guides participants through that demanding and transformative ceremony. The Sundance involves feats of sacrifice and endurance that rigorously prepare participants for acts of generosity in regular life. Since the pandemic, Rueben has turned to psychedelic medicines, offered in a sacred and ceremonial context, because they helped him release his own embodied traumas. 

During his first ceremony with psychedelic medicine, Rueben experienced a profound and healing release. He felt the deep wounds of colonialism begin to heal; he felt free. He left that ceremony with a burning desire to share his experience of freedom with others. As he writes in his 2024 memoir “It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters and Our People,” “That’s what our people deserve, and that’s what this medicine gives us. And this time, we’re not asking permission from the government or anyone else to help my people heal. No colonial government is going to tell us how to heal, especially after what they created with the residential schools.”

Rueben wants to make this healing available to everyone, but his priority is residential school survivors and their families. Residential schools, which ran in Canada from the mid 1800s until 1996, were designed by the government to remove generations of Indigenous children from their families, traditions and lands. The Canadian government has since recognized the schools as genocidal. Rueben’s own mother is a residential school survivor, and he writes in his memoir: “Thousands died in those residential schools … Each and every time one of those children was hit, or abused, or witnessed violence, or heard about someone dying and not coming back, a trauma spirit was born. How could that pain not have been passed down to Indigenous peoples across Canada?”

A healing vision

There is a long history of European colonizers interrupting Indigenous use of plant medicines. As journalist Michael Pollan reports in his book “How to Change Your Mind,” the Catholic Church declared in 1620 that the use of plants for spiritual purposes was “an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith.”

Rueben knows his ancestors once used psychedelic plant medicines prior to colonization and the residential school system “because they knew every inch of our territory, and they knew the medicinal uses of every plant that grows here. They knew the benefits of this medicine, and they knew it was a gift given to us to help our people heal.” In Canada, psychedelic medicines such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) remain illegal to produce, sell or possess, though limited access is available through the government for research. Rueben isn’t waiting for government approval. He sees the ceremonial use of psychedelic medicine as an act of sovereignty and cultural renewal. He is calling the government’s bluff. Do they really want to interrupt Indigenous healing on Indigenous land?

His vision is to build a healing center guided by Indigenous law where residential school survivors can receive the medicine for free while settler folk pay. He sees this as a reparative and just funding model given the harms and benefits that flowed from colonial dispossession. Ideally, the Canadian government and the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches — the entities that conceived and administered the schools — would fund the center as a form of reparations. But since achieving this outcome would require a protracted campaign, Rueben is focusing for now on support from civil society.

To promote healing and build momentum for his vision, Rueben already offers medicine to residential school survivors and their families. Working with experts in trauma and psychedelic therapy, he and his team have settled on a protocol that combines three medicines. They prefer the medicines remain unnamed to protect their knowledge and minimize legal scrutiny, but they are all well-known substances. They’ve found that when combined in the right dose and delivered in a sacred and ceremonial context, these medicines can help people heal their traumas without having to re-experience them. In other words, the protocol mostly avoids “bad trips” and maximizes healing. 

Generally, psychedelics are considered safe, especially when delivered in a therapeutic environment that tests for drug purity. But since psychedelics are not recommended for people with severe psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, participants must undergo a detailed intake process, including a 12-page questionnaire. According to Rueben, they’ve collectively shared the medicine with over 150 residential school survivors and their families with uniformly positive results. Now they have an overflowing waitlist. 

Transforming settlers 

Rueben is also keen to work with settlers, or the people whose families settled in colonial Canada on Indigenous land. “The spirit of trauma has been transformed into a spirit of love and compassion. It has turned into something that allows us to understand the pain of others. That’s a feeling of freedom. And if we can alleviate some of that for others and show them a better way of life, then we will.”

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Achieving genuine reconciliation requires settlers to heal wounds that can manifest as acts of supremacy and colonial arrogance. Rueben describes sitting across the table from government leaders during negotiations over the Trans Mountain pipeline and feeling sorry for how colonized they were, for how disconnected they’d become from the spirit of the land. While many Indigenous people suffer from material impoverishment because of colonization, Rueben thinks many settlers suffer a spiritual impoverishment passed down along ancestral lines.

In his memoir, Rueben reflects on how colonial violence within Europe was a precursor to it being exported worldwide and how dispossession disconnected many Europeans from their spirits and the spirit of the land. “When our spiritual connection is severed,” Rueben writes, “we don’t make decisions that are right for the Earth. … We don’t make decisions that are right for our relationships with other human beings.” 

In his book “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies,” author and trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem convincingly argues that unmetabolized trauma from colonial and racial violence in Europe (whether the Romans contra the English, the English contra the Irish, or European societies contra Jews) left settlers more likely to enact violence in North America to experience the power and control that had been lacking in their ancestral histories. In other words, victims can easily become perpetrators.

Rueben wants to interrupt this cycle for all peoples. As he reflects in “It Stops Here”: “We will open this medicine up to everybody living in our territories because we want to show them a higher state of spiritual consciousness. We want to show them heaven. We want them to understand that they carry a spirit inside themselves. We want to give them a right to heal and change their life. … And when they experience that, their lives will be better, and they will make better choices. Then collectively we will create change.”

A sacred medicine field trip

This summer, I was fortunate to experience a medicine journey with Rueben and his team. The settlers they’ve worked with so far are either friends or contacts who might be able to support the proposed healing center. I journeyed with six other settlers, all of us engaged in either environmental justice or healing justice work.

Although it was one of the most profound and transformative experiences of my life, research on psychedelic medicine tells me my experience of awe, re-enchantment and healing is downright predictable. In a landmark 2006 study, Roland Griffiths from Johns Hopkins University administered psilocybin to volunteers with no experience with psychedelics. Seventy percent said the experience, in terms of meaning, was on par with the birth of children, the death of loved ones and their wedding days. Subsequent research has found that psilocybin reliably produces mystical experiences when administered in a supportive therapeutic environment. 

As an undergraduate student 25 years ago, I’d turned to psilocybin and LSD for fun, adventure and a dose of rebellion. Each experience was powerful and offered lessons that were probably more impactful than I realized. But none approached the ego-shaking healing intensity of Rueben’s protocol. I attribute the difference to the careful combination of medicines and the ceremonial container Rueben and his team created for the journey. Their protocol shares elements with academic studies exploring the healing potential of psychedelic therapy: a comfortable setting, a carefully crafted soundtrack and eye coverings to encourage an inward journey. 

But the experience was also shaped by Rueben’s lifetime of healing and ritual work rooted in Indigenous teachings. We were all cleansed with cedar and fanned with eagle feathers before the ceremony began. Rueben generously and powerfully sang during the ceremony, drawing his ancestors and other healing spirits he’d cultivated relationships with into the room.

It’s hard to articulate, but I think his team’s careful ritual work allowed me to better connect with my ancestors, my spirit and the spirit energy that is alive in all animate and inanimate matter. We were being gently invited to see and feel the world differently, to question assumptions inherited from a Western materialist and human-supremacist worldview. Might our ancestors, for example, still be with us, and might our family relations extend across the species line? 

Because of the fuzzy legality surrounding the medicine, I can’t share the names of all the guides. But one was Gary Turner, who is currently coproducing a documentary, “Medicine/St’élmexw,” on psychedelic medicine and de-colonial healing that features the work of Rueben and others. Turner, a fellow settler in his early 50s, struck me as a tender, caring man whose ego had been ground down by years of self-work, including his experiences with Rueben’s protocol. Rueben and his team are walking endorsements for the power of their medicine.

Facing fear, feeling connection

Before I took the medicine, the words “spirit” and “heaven” were abstractions. Even as a practicing Buddhist, concepts like “interbeing” — which seeks to capture the fundamental relationality of all earthly matter — lived in my body as ideas more than breathing realities. During the ceremony, these ideas came to precious life and danced in my viscera.

We began by sharing our intentions for the journey. I wanted to work on fear. I’ve struggled with anxiety since my late 20s and find it limiting. My academic research focuses on how existential fear — particularly fear of death — shapes bad behavior and unjust political outcomes. A scared animal is often a scary animal. Without cultural resources to metabolize our existential fears, it’s easy to seek security and safety in irrational but alluring fantasies of supremacy that compensate for feelings of powerlessness. 

I wanted to learn more about fear to relieve anxiety and lessen my own compensatory attachments to ego. As it turned out, fear was the most accessible emotion for me since I was buzzing with anxiety before taking the medicine. I was worried I’d have a panic attack, pass out, and create an embarrassing, disruptive scene. Worrying about worry, worrying about panic attacks consumes an unhealthy amount of psychic energy while paradoxically making panic more likely.

Ancestors all the way down

Once the medicine hit my bloodstream, my maternal grandmother who passed away 15 years ago visited. This was unexpected, but in hindsight, anxiety is common across my maternal line. I’ve long felt the surplus nervous energy in my organism exceeded my own lived experience. When my mother was inside my grandmother’s womb, like all fetuses with ovaries, my mother already held all her eggs, two of which would become my sister and me many years later. In other words, I don’t just share genes with my grandmother: I was part of her and my mother’s bodies long before I came into the world.

My grandmother’s face held pain, but it was beautiful to be visited by her. I realized my ancestors are very much with me. I rubbed my arm as I felt them alive in my organism and still with me. I didn’t know the source of my grandmother’s pain, but I understand from other family members that she experienced considerable status anxiety, having grown up poor, raised by her single mother from Scotland who was trying to eke out a living in a new land. As my journey progressed, my grandmother’s pain morphed towards joy. During her life, she and my grandfather had been avid ballroom dancers. I saw her dancing joyfully, feeling free. She was helping me heal, but the sacred medicine was also helping me heal her spirit. Ancestral wounds were being tended to; it was a deeply healing experience that still brings tears to my eyes.

As the journey advanced, my encounters with ancestors broadened. I was visited by lineage ancestors in the Buddhist tradition I’m trained in, by animal ancestors and by plant ancestors. The phrase that bubbled up from my unconscious was “ancestors all the way down.” In that moment, I understood my place in a deeply interwoven universe. The particles comprising my organism have shaped different assemblages of animate and inanimate matter on this planet and beyond and will continue doing so into the future. 

The protocol was doing its work.

Nəc̓əmat

Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ is the language traditionally spoken by the Tsleil-Waututh, and its word for oneness or interconnection is nəc̓əmat (pronounced naut’sa mawt). For Rueben, to experience nəc̓əmat is to connect with “the interrelatedness of all beings — the spiritual realm from which everything that has a spirit comes. Some might call this heaven.” 

At my journey’s midpoint, I experienced reality folding into itself, forming a vortex or tunnel akin to those described in near-death experiences. On the other side, I found myself in what can best be described as heaven. For perhaps the first time in my conscious life, my body was without fear, and I experienced deep feelings of gratitude and love. 

After the journey, I devoured Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind,” and these words resonated: “What was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of deeply rooted conviction. And more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.” I was later struck by how we walk around daily with the embodied potential to feel nəc̓əmat, to feel love, to feel gratitude. Despite the catalytic and “trippy” power of the medicine, it was my body that felt deep healing, connection and fearlessness. The journey gave me a new embodied baseline to refer back to. 

Pausing the default mode network

Scientists who have imaged the brains of patients journeying on psychedelics have noticed significant changes in what is referred to as the Default Mode Network, or DMN, which includes brain structures associated with our self-construct. Our DMN is particularly active when we engage in self-referential thought and tends to be overactive in many mental health disorders, such as PTSD. Scientists hypothesize that this hyperactivity stems from excessive rumination and self-criticism, what Buddhists call “suffering.” 

Psychedelics appear to deactivate the DMN. They can help us get out of our way, experience a more full reality, and be changed by the experience when our DMN comes back online, perhaps less vigilant given the liberation experienced on the other side of self. As Pollan writes, “Taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness — moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.”

Meditation has also been found to deactivate the DMN. I’ve benefited tremendously from a regular meditation practice for over 20 years, but my psychedelic journey with Rueben blasted me into a positively altered state that I’ve never experienced sitting on my cushion. Unsurprisingly, meditation has been found to enhance psychedelic experiences and so the two modalities can work in tandem. 

Rueben used to think that we should only experience heightened states of spiritual consciousness if they were self-induced, if we could get there on our own first. “Now I’ve changed my mind because I’ve seen my people benefit tremendously from the medicine, which brings them to a higher state of spiritual consciousness and that’s a good foundation to start from.”

He thinks that getting to viscerally experience nəc̓əmat can offer us new embodied baselines and insights that we can bring back into everyday life, helping us better address the different challenges we face. After the journey, Rueben spoke to us about the importance of maintaining some kind of daily practice to connect with spirit (our spirit, the spirit of our ancestors, and the spirit of the land). This daily practice is also a way of remembering our visceral experience of nəc̓əmat so that the medicine can keep doing its work. 

Our guides told us that integrating our experience is as important as the journey itself, otherwise what was deeply felt in ceremony will become an ephemeral dream that is hard to recall, let alone touch. I’ve noticed a renewed investment in my meditation practice, an opportunity to remember the heaven that we daily inhabit on this planet. I fully concur with Rueben that the living hell we humans — especially white settlers such as myself — regularly create for others is at least partly fueled by our disconnection from nəc̓əmat, from spirit, from heaven on earth.

Enduring effects?

Does the healing last? I’m still feeling the effects a few months out. Since the journey, I’ve felt fear and anxiety, but they feel less rooted in my body and pass more quickly. I’m less scared of these feelings; we’re in a better relationship. Maybe my DMN is more relaxed having witnessed the awe and wonder that my vigilant ego-defense had blocked me from seeing? Researchers have found that a single high dose of psilocybin is associated with enduring increases in “trait openness, psychological wellbeing and life satisfaction” in volunteers 14 months later.

Although no longitudinal studies exist on Rueben’s protocol, long waitlists for residential school survivors and their families suggest that the medicine worked for those who shared their journey experiences with community members. Moreover, the research on psychedelic therapy and trauma — even severe PTSD — is promising. (Though the U.S. Federal Drug Administration recently made the controversial decision to not approve MDMA-supported therapy, so more clinical trials will be needed before approval.)

Rueben and his team don’t expect one journey alone to heal complex trauma. But they’re convinced that their powerful medicine needs to be made widely available given the depth of pain among residential school survivors and their families. Moreover, the levels of polarization, injustice, supremacy thinking and suffering among settler peoples suggest that additional healing and transformation supports are needed for them as well. 

Visiting heaven on earth

Currently, the waitlist for medicine journeys is being generated through word-of-mouth and personal connections, but if Rueben’s vision comes to fruition and funding can be secured to staff and house the protocol, then this powerful medicine will soon be widely available. Rueben has honed his protocol in dialogue with other North American Indigenous leaders — so, if he is successful in launching his center, it will likely become a model for Indigenous nations across the continent. 

Rueben wants to heal the wounds caused by European colonization so that Indigenous people can better defend their lands and cultures. But he knows that securing a livable future requires that settler people heal their own colonial and ancestral wounds. He wants settlers to experience nəc̓əmat, connect with the spirit of the land and become allies in decolonization and collective healing. While his vision requires settlers to pay for access to the medicine, the return on investment is nothing less than a visit to heaven on earth, the experience of nəc̓əmat, the experience of living in beloved community with all beings, with the hope that these healing experiences will bend the moral arc of our communities toward care and justice. In other words, it’s priceless.

This article Meet the Indigenous leader using psychedelic medicine to heal the traumas of colonization was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/indigenous-leader-reuben-george-heal-traumas-colonization-psychedelic-medicine/